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Joan Blades

Co-Founder and Board President

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Joan is a co-founder and Board President of MomsRising. She is also a co-founder of MoveOn.org and Living Room Conversations, an open source effort to rebuild respectful civil discourse across ideological, cultural and party lines while embracing our core-shared values.

She is a Great Work Cultures champion and co-author of The Custom-Fit Workplace: Choose When Where and How to Work and Boost Your Bottom Line (http://customfitworkplace.org/), winner of a Nautilus book award in 2011, and The Motherhood Manifesto, which won the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize in 2007. A mediator (attorney) by training and inclination, she is a nature lover, artist and true believer in the power of citizens and our need to rebuild respectful civil discourse while embracing our core shared values.

What is your mom super power?

“I loved it when my kids were little and I could make things all better. This is typically an age-limited super power that I miss!”

Blog Post List

Last month I was part of a community Living Room Conversation event about affordable housing at the Peninsula JCC in Silicon Valley, a community that is severely housing cost burdened. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, housing is considered affordable when a person pays no more than 30 percent of income toward housing costs, including utilities. When people pay more than 30 percent of income toward housing costs, they are considered “housing cost burdened,” and when they pay more than 50 percent, they are considered severely housing cost burdened. I listened...

Today more than ever, political divisions are straining cherished relationships between family and friends. As you prepare to gather with family and friends in November and December, there is no better time to learn how to navigate challenging conversations with respect and curiosity. Come join the JCC East Bay and me on Tuesday, November 14, for an introduction on how to create dialogue across difference. Through thoughtful conversation and the power of listening, we can begin to mend fractured relationships we have with our friends, family, neighbors, and community. These relationships...

This Friday , The Armor of Light is going to open in 20 cities across the nation . This documentary is asking us to have a thoughtful conversation about guns and reducing gun violence with all kinds of Americans. The Armor of Light follows evangelical minister Reverend Rob Schenck, anti-abortion activist and fixture on the political far right, who ultimately asks whether being pro-gun is consistent with being pro-life. This is not easy. Reverend Schenck is troubled by the reactions of his long-time friends and colleagues who warn him away from this issue. The film includes Rev. Schenck’s...

Pro-voice is a practice of nonviolence rooted in conflict-transformation principles. It is a process to create fundamental change in the way our culture addresses personal experiences with abortion. Our pro-voice approach creates, replicates, and sustains strategies that grow culture change. Our nonviolent practices are modeled by how we: Create opportunities for women and men to feel heard, with dignity and respect. Take a public stand of support beside all women and men with personal abortion experiences. Develop projects, programs, and strategies in direct response to the voices and needs...

By Joan Blades and Ralph Benko What's really at the root of America's political misery? We say: people just are not listening to each other. It's not merely at the level of elected officials. Elected officials are only the tip of the iceberg. And the iceberg is ... us. (The good news? We can transform... everything. And it's already happening.) We are not the only ones to notice the problem. The University of Virginia's Center for Politics recently published a fascinating article entitled The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is The Other Party . The authors, two political scientists Alan I...

My daughter is going to college this fall and we are getting ready. Her school recommended a number of items for her dorm which we dutifully purchased. Having worked on getting toxic flame retardants out of the foam in our couches over the past several years, it occurred to me that I should have the school-recommended foam mattress toppers for my daughter tested for those same toxic chemicals.

I became aware of the huge bias against mothers in hiring, wages and advancement over a decade ago. In response I co-founded MomsRising.org with Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner. As I learned more and more about work that was compatible with parenthood it became clear that all the practices that are good for mothers are good for everybody, businesses included. In 2010 I co-wrote The Custom-Fit Workplace: Choose When, Where and How to Work and Boost the Bottom Line . Out of the pink ghetto, a year later, speaking at a Wall St. conference it became clear to me that even this was not sufficient! There...

This blog post originally appeared in the Huffington Post . After eight years of friendship and mutual support on the phone and online, I finally met Kiki Peppard last month! Kiki's experiences moving to Pennsylvania as a working single mom of two children is the first story in The Motherhood Manifesto . Her story details her experiences going to interview for jobs and having potential employers ask if she was married and if she had kids. As soon as prospective employers heard she wasn't married and had kids, they were not interested in learning any more about her. They didn't care about how...

Sheryl Sandburg's new book Lean In puts a spotlight on the shortage of women leaders in the work force. She underscores that motherhood is a time when many women get side tracked from their careers. She advises young women to "lean in" in order to stay on track, move up the hierarchy, and become leaders. Women who step back when they anticipate motherhood or are sidelined when they become pregnant are falling off the top career tracks. At MomsRising, we celebrate mothers in leadership and value leaders like Sheryl who encourage and mentor other women to lead. This said, leaning in is not...

Tea Party and MoveOn activists joining voices to reinstate Glass-Steagall? That's not far-fetched... this is common ground. I admit that I had butterflies in my stomach last week when I thought about co-hosting a Living Room Conversation about crony capitalism with my friend Mark Meckler, who is a co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. Living Room Conversations are intimate structured conversations that invite grassroots progressives and conservatives to build relationships and find common ground on diverse issues. Talking to Mark on the phone over the last couple of years I've learned that I...

Last year LivingRoomConversations.org was launched with the goal of "revitalizing the art of conversation among people with diverse views and to remind our fellow Americans of the power and beauty of civil discourse." Living Room Conversations have been co-hosted by conservative/progressive host teams on energy, money in politics, the role of government, immigration and gay marriage. The early responses to the conversations have been encouraging and even inspiring. "Participating in the Living Room Conversation brought me back my boyhood when my family sat around the dinner table debating the...

by Tojosan on flickr.com http://www.flickr.com/photos/tojosan/2942623369/ On December 4, 2011, the Livingroom Conversations Website went live and I co-hosted a demonstration Living Room Conversation gathering with my conservative partner Amanda Kathyrn Roman. I'm still feeling the glow. I expanded my understanding of where we might find common ground across party lines around reducing the influence of big money in politics, and people participating in the conversation expressed interest in a future Living Room Conversation about immigration. What a pleasure conversing respectfully and...

Would you believe me if I told you that we could take a big step to combating climate change simply by staying home from work? Rather, I should say, staying home and working. Call it “telecommuting.” Call it “virtual work.” Call it “working from home.” Call it “netWork.” I’m going to call it “telework,” and here’s how it could be both a key climate solution and also an incredible business boost. Last year, I co-wrote a book called The Custom-Fit Workplace , which is about how everyone needs work that fits their life, and how employers are well-served to create a workplace that respects their...

Labor Day marks the one year anniversary of the publication of The Custom-Fit Workplace . I regret to report that we have not transformed modern work culture...yet! The good news, this Labor Day, is that allBusiness.com , a leading online resource for small business, featured a detailed article about Custom-Fit Work opportunities for Labor Day. Read it and see if you can envision work norms that honor the lives of all workers. Bottom line- 1. The modern workforce is vastly more diverse than the workforce of the 50s. Modern workers need job structures that better fit the realities of their...

Did you know that earlier this year the federal government promoted a week dedicated to telework? The intent was to encourage government agencies to overcome obstacles and discover the advantages of virtual work. General Services Administration administrator Martha Johnson explained, "Telework is revolutionizing the way government works, helping us to be more mobile, more agile, more flexible, more productive, and deliver better results for the American people." Virtual work is ripe for becoming a modern working norm. What will it take to get all employers discover the advantages? You might...

This holiday season as we think of peace on earth and good will towards all, I'm thinking of how to translate this sentiment into a culture of good workplaces all year long. My New Year's resolution is to help spark a new workplace norm: "Everyone deserves a job that fits," and the corollary, "Any employer that neglects to offer employees work that fits will hurt their own bottom line." Flexible work, virtual work, non-linear career paths, even babies at work can all be part of Custom-Fit Workplaces, and if you want to learn more, they're all covered in the book, The Custom-Fit Workplace:...

Hey, we hit it big time in the mainstream media! USA Today just published an op-ed by MomsRising’s own Joan Blades that links business success with issues near and dear to us: Fair pay, workplace flexibility, and respect for the lives and ambitions of all workers. The op-ed covers the growing body of research showing that companies that pay fair wages, as well as offer flexibility and training to even entry-level and lower-skilled employees, do better financially than those that don’t.[1] How cool is that? Sadly, too few CEOs and bosses know about this research, which got us thinking… What if...